Brothers joined at the schtick

The Farrelly Brothers have just decided to split up. At least for an hour. But for a pair who tend to finish each other's sentences - and whose seamless Yin and Yang approach on movie sets perplexes actors from Jim Carrey to Cameron Diaz - this is pretty stunning news.

More so because the duo's latest effort - a movie about conjoined twins, titled Stuck on You - seems as much about the double identity of the brothers themselves as the fused-at-the-hip predicament of the two guys on the screen. The fact that the script has been kicking around the brothers' project list for years, before There's Something About Mary and Me, Myself and Irene, seemed to enhance it as fraternal metaphor.

But right now Bobby Farrelly, the younger of the two princes of gross out, is ambling into this New York hotel room without his sibling-in-schlock. It's as disconcerting as watching Dolce without Gabbana, Paris minus Nicky, Simon split from Garfunkel.

It's not, of course, a permanent rupture, not even a trial separation. "The problem is that I jump in and answer every question and he gets bored just sitting there," Bobby explains apologetically. "So we decided to do our own. That way he gets to talk."

After five movies in eight years the idea of schmoozing the press separately - as discombobulating as it might be for anyone expecting two Farrellys for the price of one - is actually a pretty standard Farrelly response: try anything at least once.

"I remember when we were playing around with the hair gel joke in There's Something About Mary," Bobby says. "I don't think that, for a moment, either of us thought it would end up in the final movie. It was too risky and not because of the issue of whether it was bad taste. But with a joke like that - even if people laugh - you have to be careful to see whether it alienates people from the character. And if that happens it takes them out of the story."

In another room, an hour or so later, Peter, happily hearing himself speak, out of earshot of his raucous brother, managed to pick up and expand on the same point: "There's a world of difference between someone saying, 'That's really funny. What a loser that guy or chick is', to 'That's really funny. I really identified with the dilemma.' And with the hair gel joke, when we tested it, we got much more of the second reaction than we expected."

But at least he said it himself. Actually it's not as though one is the introvert and the other the extrovert. Bobby, 45, is more manic-looking with wild hair and a little goatee and, yes, the louder voice. Peter, 46, is just as forthright but a little quieter.

Whatever you think of their movies and the touchy issues they tackle strictly for laughs - multiple personality disorders, various limbless disabilities, enough bodily fluids to keep a specimen lab busy, animals in distress and obesity - there is no arguing with the brothers' success. Those five films - from Dumber and Dumber in 1994 to Shallow Hal two years ago - have made $US1 billion ($A1.3 billion) and launched a genre now sadly overrun with people with less finesse.

They also managed, incongruously, to give their films the sort of cachet among Hollywood stars that Woody Allen films once had; if they liked to appear in Allen's films to showcase their cleverness they seek out Farrelly roles to prove what good sports they are.

In this one, for example, both Cher and Meryl Streep put in appearances as themselves and, in Cher's case, playing to her stereotype as self-absorbed diva. And Meryl sings and dances.

In the last one, Shallow Hal, not only did Gwyneth Paltrow mess around with her body image - in a way that had as many detractors as admirers of her self deprecation - but got successful self-help guru, Tony Robbins, to send himself up.

"I know that directors are meant to loathe the fact that studios want to test how movies play and tweak them as a result of the poll data," Bobby says. "But we test all the time. Initially it's on each other. But long before the studio gets hold of our movie we have the score cards and the focus groups out on our own. When you're dealing with edgy material, it's the only way you can tell if you've crossed a line. We don't actually want to insult people we like or admire."

In Stuck on You it is definitely the conjoined twins, played by Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, that the brothers admire. The humour comes mostly from the compromises each has to make to the other so they can each, for example, have a sex life. Kinnear's character, Walt, wants to pursue a career in Hollywood so the Damon twin, co-incidentally known as a Bob, "agrees" to come along more as a supportive sibling than semi-attached burden.

Something like that happened 15 years ago when Peter left the family base on a whim to become a screenwriter despite having no writing experience. He convinced his geologist brother to join him.

Stuck on You was one of their early scripts but since it has the trickiest subject matter it never got the green light. In one draft Carrey and Allen were to play the twins. Twins with a 27-year age difference that would really show? "Well, in the script one twin has 90 per cent of a shared liver so he ages better," explains Bobby. In any case, it was only after the success of the other films that Hollywood "got" the brothers enough to give them the go ahead.

"It was never our idea to do this as some sort of autobiographical thing," Peter says. "I mean, how pretentious would that be? We lead quite separate lives apart from work. But when we started showing wives and families and friends the film they all said, 'That's you and Bob. You both come from New England, you move to Hollywood and everyone thinks you're morons.' So maybe we did it subconsciously. But we're not going to sweat it."